I don't know how many
times I've seen Sunset Boulevard (1950). I've never counted. A
dozen, perhaps? More? The last time I saw it, on a DVD, I noticed something
that I never caught in previous viewings. In the scene in which Joe Gillis
(William Holden) goes to Artie Green's apartment (Jack Webb, who was soon
to become a huge TV star in his show Dragnet) on New Year's Eve,
he wants to use the phone to call Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim),
to have him send all of Gillis' clothes to Artie's house. He's decided
to move out of Norma Desmond's mansion on Sunset Boulevard and stay at
Artie's until he gets his bearings. Two blondes are sitting on the couch,
laughing hysterically as one of them is talking on the phone, which is
on a side table next to the couch. On the table, in the lower right hand
corner of the screen, there is something else, which I never paid attention
to. After seeing the film umpteenth time, I realised it was a model for
the statue of Dagon in the temple that Samson brings down in Samson
and Delilah (1949). Samson and Delilah was made for Paramount,
as was Sunset Boulevard, and shot around the same time. In the
huge temple seen on the screen at the end of the movie – the famous set
piece of Samson bringing down the temple – there is a roaring fire in
Dagon's belly. A nice little touch, barely visible in Sunset Boulevard,
are cigarette butts stubbed out in the belly of the Dagon maquette.

Ever since the Nouvelle
Vague in the early ‘60s, filmmakers have been making references in their
films to other films. Part homage, part pointing the way to their influences,
it's somewhere between a joke and a genuflection to the directors they
admire. They are actes gratuites – perhaps références
gratuites would be better – which are planted strictly for the cognoscenti
to recognise. As for those who do not, maybe footnotes can one day be
appended at the end of the film. Michel Piccoli, in Contempt, always
wore his hat, emulating Dean Martin in Some Came Running. 1963,
the year Contempt was made, was not that far away from 1958, in
which Some Came Running was produced – and Godard's audiences at
the time could easily make the connection. But now, over forty years later,
young viewers might need a special study guide to help them identify Some
Came Running and even who Dean Martin was, much in the same way we
need notes in reading Shakespeare in order to know what certain words
meant in Shakespeare's day. François Truffaut names his main character
Lachenay in The Soft Skin (1964) after Marcel Dalio's de la Cheyniest
in Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939), and has an inn called
La Colinière – the name of the country house in Rules of the
Game – and expects some people, if only his friends and fellow cinephiles,
to recognise them.

In Hollywood, this
was a rarity. When a poster advertising The Proud Land appears
in the ‘Girl Hunt’ ballet in The Bandwagon (1953), we know it's
a joke that Vincente Minnelli intended for himself and his pals, but for
not the rest of us. The Proud Land was the name of the movie which
Kirk Douglas (the unscrupulous, arrogant producer in Minnelli's The
Bad and the Beautiful, made a year earlier) directs – a huge turkey
of a film after firing the director. The title also appears earlier in
The Bandwagon, on a movie house marquee when Fred Astaire is on
42nd Street. But you would have to attend a Minnelli retrospective to
make the connection.

In film
comedies, however – from Warner Brothers cartoons, to Bob Hope/Bing Crosby
‘Road’ films, to Frank Tashlin and beyond – pop culture, and especially
movie culture, was always fair game. Talking about Billy Wilder, in his
The Seven Year Itch (1955), Tom Ewell cracks wise when he's asked
whom he's hiding in the kitchen, ‘Wouldn't you like to know! Maybe it's
Marilyn Monroe!’ – a reference that not only acknowledges the film we
are watching but also the mechanics of the film’s production. The audience
is engaged in a double vision – the movie it's watching, as well as isolating
the star in the movie (the main reason for seeing the film in the first
place) from the movie itself, and reincorporating her as a gag. Even if
it's not quite what Brecht had in mind when he wrote that he wanted his
plays performed with the house lights up, it's a step in some kind of
direction.

But that's
comedy. Sunset Boulevard is something completely different. It
is a Paramount film that uses the Paramount studio as a location and even
the Paramount gateway serves an important function in the film. Gloria
Swanson, as Norma Desmond, as a once famous silent film star and
also herself a once famous silent film star, announces (as she
drives through the gates) that it was the successes of her silent movies
that kept Paramount afloat. Even the studio itself is inveigled in the
fiction of the fiction that is being presented, becoming as much a presence
in the film as the actors themselves. Cecil B. DeMille, in the film, is
one of the studio's most important directors, as indeed he was in real
life, and was with Paramount Pictures from its very inception, in 1914.
His entire career was spent at that studio. And he directed Gloria Swanson
in several movies that, in fact, were big hits. Even his nickname for
her, ‘little fella’, and her addressing him as ‘Mr DeMille’, recounts
their real-life relationship.

1. One
thing I noticed the last and only time I saw the film as an adult is that
the extras and bit players are all old, whereas the leading players are
not. Even the soldiers are old. There's a strange dialectic and a divide
between the two elements of the movie as if there are two movies. One,
the kinky part, with the stars, which accounted for its success; and the
other filled with the elderly background players, who by their very presence
suggest that whatever happened in the Bible happened a long, long time
ago. It is, after all, a story from the Old Testament. Even the
soldiers are old. Cecil B. DeMille, like John Ford, loyally offered employment
to silent movie actors who had seen better days, long after they were
forgotten.

He is shooting a Biblical
epic on Soundstage 18. And he was, on that same soundstage, when Sunset
Boulevard was being filmed. When Norma Desmond visits DeMille's set,
he is preparing a scene from Samson and Delilah. All the players
are old and, very likely, people who (like Swanson) worked with DeMille
in the silent era. (1) One can even glimpse, if just barely, Henry Wilcoxon,
who played Prince Ahtur in Samson and Delilah, as well as Julia
Faye, who plays Delilah's handmaiden – a former mistress of DeMille's
who had appeared in almost all of his sound movies, even though their
affair and her career had ended many years ago.

It's hard
to imagine the mansion in Sunset Boulevard without the suffocating
presence of Gloria Swanson's countless framed photographs of herself on
every tabletop – or without Gloria Swanson, period. But, originally, Wilder
had Mae West in mind for the role of Norma Desmond. When he approached
her, she was insulted that he would even think that she play an actress
who is past her prime. West, fifty-five at the time, never much of an
actress – more like a found-object or a self-made one – clearly couldn't
distinguish between an actress playing a role and the role itself. If
only in that respect, Mae West would have been right for the film,
although wrong in every other way. Although it's true that the success
of West's films really did keep Paramount from going under in the
early ‘30s, it's hard to imagine West in her unrelievedly, before-the-fact
camp style playing the alternately monstrous, alternately pitiful Norma
Desmond. Considering, or despite, her initial response, luckily for the
film and for Wilder she did not accept.

Before
he wrote the script, Wilder had signed Montgomery Clift to play the part
of Joe Gillis. But once the script was done and Clift read it, he refused
to do the film, partly because Gillis has an affair with an older woman.
Clift himself had, if not an affair, some kind of close relationship with
Libby Holman, a once-famous torch singer of the late ‘20s and early ‘30s
who was about twenty years older than Clift. She had been involved in
the shooting death of her then-husband, which ended her singing career
for good. Clift thought it referred more than indirectly to him and Holman.
The parallels were too great to ignore. Reportedly, Holman threatened
to commit suicide if he agreed to be in the film. He bowed out. Again,
it's hard to imagine the neutral and neutered Clift playing cynical, corrupt
and corruptible, and sexy Joe Gillis. Wilder wound up settling
for William Holden, a contract player at Paramount. If these casting strokes
were partially luck, there are other elements of the film that go beyond
the borders of chance.

When Erich
von Stroheim talks about the three greatest directors of the silent era
in Hollywood, D. W Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and himself, Max von Mayerling
(the name of the character he plays in the movie), he wasn't kidding.
Stroheim himself, without the mask of von Mayerling, was, of course,
one of Hollywood's most important directors before talkies. And of course,
the bitter irony and sadness of him projecting scenes from his unfinished
Queen Kelly (1928), surely one of the greatest movies never completed,
adds a poignancy to the fact that the character has willingly subsumed
his own life to serving his former wife and former star. Swanson herself
used the money of her then paramour, millionaire Joe Kennedy (scion of
the Kennedy clan) to finance the venture that was ultimately aborted.
The reason given was that the movie was made in the cusp period, just
between silent and sound movies, and could never be released – although
it was released in Europe in a somewhat altered version. So, the clip
of Swanson praying was the first time anyone in America had seen the film.
The real reason the movie was shut down was because of friction between
Swanson, as producer, and von Stroheim. The unfinished version was seen
in America for the first time in 1985.

2. Obviously,
in Hollywood you were paid as much as they thought you were worth. Clearly,
there was no parity. You were paid what they thought they could get you
for. Von Stroheim got the highest salary among all the talent, which indicates
that Wilder knew how crucial he was to the film. According to IMDB, these
were the salaries for Sunset Boulevard: Gloria Swanson – $50,000;
William Holden – $30,000; Nancy Olson – $5,000; Fred Clark (Sheldrake
the producer) – $4,000; Cecil B. DeMille – $10,000; Hedda Hopper – $5,000;
Buster Keaton – $1,000; H. B. Warner – $1,250; Anna Q. Nillson – $250.
Montgomery Clift was offered $5,000 a week for twelve weeks, but von Stroheim
still would have been the highest-paid performer in the film.

Erich von Stroheim's
role is another example of the collaborative effort, if we want to think
of Paramount and its history a vital ingredient that was responsible for
the remarkable outcome of this film. Can anyone else have ever been considered?
Who but von Stroheim to play the role? And clearly Wilder knew it. Von
Stroheim was paid $5000 a week plus 1,500,000 French francs (equivalent
to $36,000 in 1950) upon completion of the shoot. (2) When a director
hired von Stroheim to appear in his films, he was getting two people for
the price of one: von Stroheim, the scene-stealing actor, who could draw
attention away from the other actors merely by letting his unsmoked cigarette
burn down to his finger tips; and also a brilliant director who would
invest his character with a variety of attention-getting costumes, props
and acting tricks. It was he who suggested, to Renoir, that he wear a
neck brace in Grand Illusion (1937). His electric, over-the-top
presence enlivened many dull, barely-remembered French films of the ‘30s,
‘40s and ‘50s, in which von Stroheim, directing himself, imbues the character
he plays with a richness and complexity that the writers and directors
were unable to furnish. As for him playing the once-famous director, his
tribulations regarding Greed (1925) were already the stuff of folklore.
The half-finished Wedding March (1928) and the unfinished Queen
Kelly confirmed his reputation as some kind of undisciplined, profligate
director, and Sunset Boulevard doesn't hesitate to capitalise on
that tarnished reputation.

These are the things
we know for sure about von Stroheim vis-à-vis the two films he
acted in, directed by Billy Wilder. He wanted a riding crop with him at
all times in his previous appearance in Wilder's film as Rommel in Five
Graves to Cairo (1943). He advises Mouche, the French chambermaid
(played by Anne Baxter) to remain five feet away from him at all times,
as if she were a fly that he could swat away with his riding crop. In
Sunset Boulevard it was he who suggested to Wilder that Queen
Kelly be used as the movie that Swanson watches. It was he who suggested
to Wilder that Norma receive fan mail, all written by him. ‘I wouldn't
look too closely at the postmarks’, he advises Gillis. He came
up with the idea of the Maharajah from Hyderbad who begged for one of
Norma's stockings. ‘Later, he strangled himself with it’, a line that
is echoed in Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) – Joe (Tony Curtis
as Josephine) to Jerry (Jack Lemmon as Daphne): ‘I heard a very sad story
about a girl from Bryn Mawr. She squealed on her roommate and they found
her strangled with her own brassiere.’ Von Stroheim also suggested to
Wilder that he be filmed, as von Mayerling, ironing Norma's underwear,
an offer Wilder could refuse. In any case, von Stroheim had already
done this earlier in Queen Kelly – Prince Wolfram keeps a purloined
pair of Kitty Kelly's panties and sniffs them. We'll never know for sure
whether it was Wilder or von Stroheim who came up with the bit in which
Max, driving Norma to the studio, looking at her through the rear view
mirror, points out that her eye shadow is ‘not quite balanced’. Once on
the Paramount lot, he points out to Gillis that his offices (could they
actually have been his offices when he was making The Wedding March
at Paramount?) were where the readers' department is now. He adds, ‘I
remember my walls were covered in black patent leather’. Neither of these
two moments – the eye shadow and the leather-covered walls – sound like
details that Wilder would have been interested in, but they sound very
much like the obsessive, fetishistic situations and details that abound
in von Stroheim's films.

3. Mitchell
Leisen was the only director in Hollywood whose credit as director in
the title cards was purportedly in his own signature. This is an indication
of how important a director he was to the studio. That was long before
the days when a Hollywood film was signed ‘a film by … ‘, although Hitchcock,
DeMille and Capra were the only directors famous enough to have their
names above the title. Hitchcock went Leisen one better when he used a
caricature of himself that he drew as the logo for his television series.
But that was in the ‘50s.

In
Hold Back the Dawn (1941), an earlier script by Billy Wilder and
Charles Brackett (Wilder's writing partner for many years), directed by
Mitchell Leisen for Paramount, Charles Boyer plays a sleazy refugee, a gigolo
(like Joe Gillis), and maybe even Wilder himself in his Berlin days, stuck
in Mexico without a visa. Unable to get into America, he marries Olivia
De Havilland, an American citizen, which automatically permits him to enter
the country. Desperate for cash, he wants to sell his unusual life story
to a film company. The movie opens with Boyer crashing Paramount studios.
The person he gets to is Mitchell Leisen, the director of the film we're
watching, playing a film director (just as DeMille does in Sunset Boulevard)
– although he is not addressed as Mitchell Leisen. (3) As in Sunset Boulevard,
these scenes frame the tale that is being told in flashback, the story of
the film we're watching. When Boyer gets to the sound stage where Leisen
is directing, Leisen is shooting a scene with Veronica Lake (uncredited),
while Brian Donlevy (also uncredited) is on the sidelines watching. Both
Lake and Donleavy co-starred in I Wanted Wings, directed by Leisen,
also in 1941, and the scene being shot in Hold Back the Dawn is indeed
from I Wanted Wings. This is not necessarily an early harbinger of
post-modernism and self-referential cinema - it's the same year as Citizen
Kane - but it's a very good indication of the way that Wilder exploited
the studio system while at the same time depending on it. To put it another
way, it was cheaper to use the actual Paramount entrance than to build one
for a ‘let's pretend’ studio, but it also added a richness and depth to
the film that could not have been achieved otherwise. Or, how financial
concerns sometimes help artists drift to a before-the-fact post-modernist
relationship to their work.

4. Hedda
Hopper's lasting legacy in show business might very well be her son, the
actor William Hopper. He was Natalie Wood's father in Rebel Without
a Cause (1955), and also Perry Mason's assistant in the long-running
series Perry Mason, which will probably play in syndication until
the world ends.

It's hard to imagine
what Sunset Boulevard looked like and felt like at the time it
was released. The adult moviegoing public grew up on silent films and
Gloria Swanson was still a star, although absent from the screen for many
years. Audiences knew DeMille not only as a silent director but as the
director of epics like Cleopatra (1934), Sign of the Cross
(1932) and, of course, Samson and Delilah, which had been the highest-grossing
movie of 1949. Now for the waxworks: Buster Keaton, H.B. Warner and Anna
Q. Nilsson. Keaton's career as a great comedian and filmmaker was long
over. But he was still around, mostly in walk-ons in low-budget films.
He played in a musical remake of Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner
(1940) called In the Good Old Summertime (1949), an easy-to-take
vehicle for Judy Garland and Van Johnson (featuring baby Liza Minnelli
in her first screen role). H. B. Warner had played Christ in DeMille's
1927 King of Kings. A casualty of the sound-era, he was a supporting
actor in several Capra films and had a bit part in DeMille's 1956 The
Ten Commandments. As for Anna Q. Nilsson, apparently she was a big
star in the teens and early ‘20s, but was also a casualty of sound. It's
important to remember that in 1950 the silent era had ended only twenty-one
years earlier; many of the silent movie allusions and stars mentioned
passingly in the film – Valentino, Vilma Banky, Mabel Normand, Wallace
Reid and, of course, Adolphe Menjou, who was still working at that time
– were still familiar names to the movie-going public, and former
Paramount stars. To put it another way, Sunset Boulevard, made
over fifty-five years ago, is much further away from its initial audience
than the silent film was to talkies.

Hedda Hopper, the gossip
columnist phoning in her story of the murder at the end of the film, when
Norma is being taken into custody, was in fact one of the two most influential
newspaper gossip columnists in America at the time. Hopper, famous equally
for her hats and her venom, had been – before becoming a gossip columnist
(4) – a moderately successful actress playing supporting roles in Paramount
films, most notably in DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942) and
Leisen's delicious and undervalued Midnight (1939, with a script
by Wilder and Brackett). In the latter film she plays a snooty society
lady who also is a customer in a milliner's shop that specialises in extravagant
and outlandish hats. Parenthetically (or not so parenthetically), Leisen
himself started in films by designing costumes and then serving as art
director on several lavish DeMille spectacles before becoming a director.
One could go on. Leisen was hated by Wilder, who co-wrote with Brackett
three scripts (Arise, My Love [1940] in addition to Midnight
and Hold Back the Dawn) that Leisen directed. Wilder felt that
Leisen so mangled his scripts that he resolved, in the future, to direct
his scripts himself. Which, of course, he did. If there is a direct link
from DeMille to Leisen to Wilder and back again, it's hardly a coincidence.
I'm not in the least suggesting here a conspiracy theory that ripples
out endlessly and turns in on itself. But studios have histories and traditions
and overlapping stories, relationships and gossip that build up into an
overwhelming dense texture that runs parallel and sometimes spills over
into the film itself. Perhaps another way to put it is that Sunset
Boulevard is only enhanced and enriched by what is sometimes called
‘the genius of the system’, constantly referring to its own vertical and
horizontal archaeology.

But it's not just Paramount's
past that the film trades on. Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) is a reader
at Paramount. And her boyfriend, Artie, is an assistant director, presumably
at Paramount. At Artie's New Year's Eve party, two guys are pounding out
a popular song at the time, ‘Buttons and Bows’, a tongue-twisting ‘novelty'
number which won the Oscar for Best Song the previous year. It was written
for Paramount's Bob Hope movie, The Paleface (1948). Playing and
singing the tune are Ray Evans and Jay Livingstone, the bespectacled writers
of the song, under contract to Paramount. This kind of cross-amortisation
of music is not uncommon. Studios, having paid for the music to be written,
could use it in the context of any film they chose to. This is found to
a remarkable degree in MGM films – MGM, the home of the movie musical.
It's usually used as background music. In this film, however, the music
is very much foregrounded, another Paramount-reflexive moment, but with
a very big difference. In this case, the words have been altered to fit
the situation. The original song was such a hit at the time that viewers
were assumed to know the original words and appreciate how the
song was subverted:

Hollywood for us ain't
been so good.Got no swimming
pool, brand new clothesAll
we earn are buttons and bows. (5)

5. ‘Buttons and Bows’
lyrics (choruses only):

East is east and
west is westAnd the wrong
one I have choseLet's go where
they keep on wearin'Those frills
and flowers and buttons and bowsRings and things
and buttons and bows.

Don't bury me in
this prairieTake me where
the cement growsLet's move
down to some big townWhere they
love a gal by the cut o' her clothesAnd you'll
stand out, in buttons and bows.

My bones denounce
the buckboard bounceAnd the cactus
hurts my toesLet's vamoose
where gals keep a-usin'Those silks
and satins and linen that showsAnd I'm all
yours in buttons and bows.

Gimme eastern trimmin'
where women are womenIn high silk
hose and peek-a-boo clothesAnd French
perfume that rocks the roomAnd I'm all
yours in buttons and bows.

6. To television
viewers, however, William Demarest is best known for the long-running
sitcom My Three Sons, in which he plays Fred MacMurray's father-in-law.
MacMurray, incidentally, was offered the part of Joe Gillis after Montgomery
Clift turned it down. He turned it down because he thought it was too
sordid. MacMurray, of course, played in Wilder's Double Indemnity
(1944) and The Apartment (1960).

7. Her grandmother,
she says, was a stunt double for Pearl White, the star of the silent The
Perils of Pauline serial. Coincidentally, or not, Betty Hutton starred
in a Paramount film, The Perils of Pauline (1947), a musical about
Pearl White.

The impression
given is that everyone at the party works in films, in some underpaid,
lowly capacity or other, and probably for Paramount – hence, the
statuette of Dagon. In addition to referring to how little everyone gets
paid, it also refers to Joe Gillis' situation – he has gotten his
swimming pool and lots of brand new clothes. There are in the film,
in addition, references to scripts being tailored for Bing Crosby as well
as for Alan Ladd and Betty Hutton (who is not mentioned in the script,
but is in the final film), all of whom were big Paramount stars at the
time. The name of William Demarest, a character actor at Paramount now
mostly remembered for his roles in the movies he made with Preston Sturges,
also crops up. (6) When Betty (Nancy Olson) tells Joe about her childhood
aspirations and her life as a third-generation Hollywood brat, they start
by walking through the Paramount backlot streets. (7) They pass through
the Western street, stop and talk, and leave via Washington Square as
Gillis lets us know – the same Washington Square set used in the previous
year's William Wyler's Paramount film, The Heiress, which starred
Olivia De Havilland and Montgomery Clift. Paramount is more than a backdrop
– its history and present-day production both play an active role in the
film.

Sunset Boulevard
has all these echoes, tethering it to the real Hollywood, thus lending
the film an air of unimpeachable authenticity – as opposed to The Bad
and the Beautiful (1952), which never attempts to suggest that the
people in the film or the films within the film have any relation to an
existing studio, much less MGM. It's some made-up studio, with made-up
stars and fake names in made-up movies. The movies within the movies in
no way trace their lineage to other MGM productions or refer to the meta-studio
with the authenticity, affection and distaste that Sunset Boulevard
does. None of the films glimpsed or alluded to in The Bad and the Beautiful
have any MGM reality quotient. There are indirect allusions to Val Lewton
and Cat People (1942) – even though The Bad and the Beautiful
is supposed to take place in the ‘30s – and to John Barrymore and his
alcoholic daughter. But these are, at best, half-hearted feints. The generic
German director, von Ellstein (played by Ivan Triesault), complete with
cigarette holder, is, of course, a genius and a tyrant, as we know
all German directors are or were, but it's a caricature that has no teeth.
Although in his later Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), another
movie about filmmaking that might have had more suggestions grounding
it in the reality of its milieu of Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, Minnelli references
The Bad and the Beautiful as one of the greatest triumphs of Kirk
Douglas (who plays a washed-up actor) and the fictional director (played
by Edward G. Robinson), and shows a clip from the earlier film. Here is
a movie about movies and nothing at all is made of the fact that Erich
von Stroheim Jr (sic!) is Minnelli's assistant director – as he was on
Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958)! Similar opportunities are either
missed or deliberately avoided in George Cukor's A Star is Born (1954),
in which one could easily imagine many real-life hints encrusted in the
screenplay referring to the legendary Judy Garland's personal history,
much of which was public knowledge. Nor is there any Warner Brothersness
about the film in the way that Sunset Boulevard incorporates and
blends in Paramount in its own Sunset Boulevard myth-making. These
possibilities are also ignored or remain unpursued in Joseph Mankiewicz's
The Barefoot Contessa (1954), despite the Howard Hughes-like character
in it played by Warren Stevens. However, when Ava Gardner recognises Harry
Dawes' name (Humphrey Bogart) as the director of stars like Harlow and
Lombard, there's very little conviction or solidity to the claim. In other
words, the ‘Paramountness’ of Sunset Boulevard is not just a prop
or a backdrop for the film; it is inherently part of the story. Strip
the film of all of its ‘Paramount’ elements and what do you have? You
may have a movie but not the same movie. Paramount is part of the DNA
structure of Sunset Boulevard.

So what does all of
this mean, if anything? It adds a texture and an underpinning to Sunset
Boulevard that is unparalleled in movie lore. Its self-referentiality
is not only proper and earned; it grounds the film in the real
tinsel beneath the tinsel in tinseltown. We are watching two films at
the same time: the one on the screen, and the associations that are triggered
by the extra-curricular references it alludes to – suggesting, more than
is usually the case, the possibility that the feverish melodrama being
presented is entirely plausible.

In those days, many
of the major companies had a ‘news’ division that usually interspersed
a light sprinkling of major news events with primarily shots of glamorous
stars under contract to the studio, attending premieres of the studios’
latest films. These news features were used to round out a programme,
along with cartoons and coming attractions before the film began. Today,
of course, these so-called ‘newsreels’ from fifty years ago serve a different
purpose. They have assumed historical importance, not for their news coverage
(which was negligible), but for their celebrity quotient. Seeing Marilyn
Monroe and Jane Russell planting their handprints in cement in front of
Grauman's Chinese Theater in conjunction with the release of Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes (1953) is a document that more than transcends its
origins, although at the time it was merely part of the movie studio’s
publicity machine. As Norma makes her final descent down the staircase,
in her greatest role as Salome, pathetic, over-the-top, and unbearably
moving, the newsreel cameras are there to catch it all. The news cameras
filming Norma Desmond's descent into hell are, fittingly enough, of course,
those of Paramount News, which called itself ‘the eyes and ears of the
world’, a slogan that is emblazoned on the camera crew truck. Once again,
we're in a bitterly ironic mode. Norma says, earlier in the film, ‘There
was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole wide world. But
that wasn't enough for them. Oh no! They also wanted the ears, too.’

At this point, Norma
is completely deranged and is off, most likely not to prison, but probably
to the same place where they will put Blanche Dubois a year later (although
Blanche will work for another studio). Norma is Salome. She has
become the creature she invented in her own script, written for her to
play. Erich von Stroheim is standing in between the two Paramount newsreel
cameras. She is confused. She thinks he is DeMille. Why hadn't we
noticed before what she, in her madness, notices - how much DeMille and
von Stroheim look alike? Did DeMille and von Stroheim run into each other
during the Sunset Boulevard shoot? Can anyone imagine what they
might have talked about? ‘What is the scene?’ He, von Stroheim/Max von
Mayerling/Cecil B. DeMille barks out: ‘This is the staircase of the palace.’
The cameras start rolling. Erich von Stroheim is now finishing the unfinished
Queen Kelly with Gloria Swanson. He, von Stroheim, is behind the
cameras once again, for the first time in almost two decades. We can be
sure that the irony of the situation was not lost on him. He is directing
in a film but he is not directing a film. In Swanson's slow, tragic
descent down the staircase, Wilder, subverting DeMille for his own purposes,
wryly commenting on the man and his kitsch Biblicals, is creating a tragedy
about cinema and delusions and illusions, glamour and aging in a culture
that adores the former and abhors the latter, shot through with a dizzying
orgy of intertexuality and self-referentiality that places the movie and
its themes in a completely different arena from other movies. In a sense,
it is the first meta-film, a film that is not only commenting on itself
but also on the process of, the apparatus of, and the meaning of filmmaking
itself. (Other meta-films? The Killing [1956]. Once Upon a Time
in the West [1968]. Le Samourai [1967]. And perhaps even Keaton's
Sherlock Jr [1924].) Finally, the cameras are turning for Norma
again. With the Paramount newsreel division there to film it.

When
von Stroheim made Five Graves to Cairo for Wilder, his character,
Rommel, has to wear field glasses and a camera around his neck. Von Stroheim
insisted on real German field glasses and a Leica camera. He also wanted
actual film in the camera. Wilder asked him why, since the audience would
never know. Von Stroheim replied: ‘An audience always senses whether a prop
is genuine or false.’ The cameras are finally there for Norma. But they
are only used as a ruse to get Norma down the stairs, even though they were
originally called to document the crime. The cameras are turning for Norma
one last time, but there are no concessions to von Stroheim's philosophy
this time. There really is no film in the camera recording her last
soliloquy. But the ultimate and most awful irony of all – in a movie stuffed
to the gills with ironies, intentional and otherwise – is that, even if
there was (let us suppose) film in the camera, could the film ever be and
would the film ever be shown? Would it be put it on the screen next week,
preceding another Paramount film? The empty cameras are turning for Norma,
the real cameras are turning for Swanson. The image becomes blurry and out-of-focus
and suffused with light. Fade to black. Fade in, the Paramount logo, which
forms a perfect halo of stars around Norma's now absent image, awarding
Norma the apotheosis she desperately wanted and Swanson the one she richly
deserved.